I spent the afternoon training with Ada, a competitive bodybuilder.
I thought our conversations would revolve around training splits, nutrition and what it takes to prepare for a bodybuilding competition. And to be fair, we did talk about that. However, our conversations drifted into something much bigger.
Femininity
Before our workout, I asked her a question that I’d been thinking about for a while. Have you ever worried that bodybuilding made you less feminine?
Smiling as though it was an expected question, she admitted something that surprised me.
There was a point during her competition prep when she recalled looking at herself in the mirror and wondered if she’d still be attractive, specifically whether people would still see her as feminine.
Not because she regretted becoming stronger, but because she knew that the world has a limited picture of what femininity looks like.
That answer stayed with me for a while, because I realized that I hadn’t just asked a bodybuilding question. I had asked a human one.
For many of us, there's an invisible checklist of what femininity should look like.
Strong, but not intimidating
Confident, but never mistaken for arrogant.
We subconsciously absorb these ideas from advertisements, social media, and conversations that we barely even remember. Eventually, it becomes so familiar that we stop asking where they come from. We simply assume that they are true.
What fascinated me about Ada's journey wasn't just the strength in her physique, but that she had spent years committing herself to something difficult. Bodybuilding demands that you choose long term goals over short term comfort. It requires patience, consistency and an extraordinary amount of trust in a process where the results take months to reveal itself.
Her mindset around this journey became a question of alignment.
“Is this helping me become the person I’m trying to become?”
And those muscles? They were simply a byproduct of her repeatedly answering that question.
One of my favorite moments came when she talked about learning to protect her energy. She explained that not everyone would understand her choices and eventually she stopped feeling the need to convince them. This was so powerful because imagine how much of our lives that we spend trying to fit definitions that we never created.
As our workout came to an end, I realized that I hadn’t spent the afternoon learning about bodybuilding. I had spent it learning about ownership. Ownership over your time, energy and identity.
So maybe femininity isn't something measured by the size of your shoulders or the softness of your features.
Maybe femininity was never meant to fit inside a single definition at all.
Maybe it's found in the quiet confidence of becoming more fully yourself.
Whatever that happens to look like.
For the Whimsical Hot girls
With love,
Chiamaka
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